The defense argued that the incident was a tragic accident caused partly by the fact that the plane's altimeter was not working and the gondola cable that the plane hit was not on the map that he was given.
In his talk, Teso demonstrated an Android application he built that allowed him to redirect a virtual plane with just a tap on a map application running on his Samsung Galaxy phone.
Northrop Grumman ( NOC - news - people ) makes an unmanned spy plane called Global Hawk, which can map and image huge areas quickly, but it is expensive, and expensive to fly, and can stay aloft for only a day or so.